Rare Book Monthly
Perspective on Books and the Net
For listing sites is there light at the end of the tunnel or...
In the course of aggregating all listings on a commission-free basis the difference between common and rare, collectible and casual will emerge, defined by 'listing time' and price. The length of time an item is listed at a specific price IS RELEVANT, the current ever-green listing approach absurd. Items remain posted for years.
In a single search copies will be stacked up like cord wood. Indexes of interest will emerge for every title and edition and they will determine value based on several factors: number of copies, number of days posted, relevance to collecting spheres as defined by Wiki Bibliographies and other similar approaches. In this environment, the power to set prices will shift from the seller to the market.
The single financial incentive to organize/promote this universal index of works on paper available for sale is going to be the opportunity to handle the credit card processing. Given the scale of the project, the credit card processing should be reward enough and probably be the lowest available online. The identity of the seller will be transparent, the incentive for buyer and seller to use the payment system its low cost.
Elsewhere in this issue of AE Monthly Mike Stillman has written an article, Browsers as Servers: Is Change Coming to Bookselling?, that may provide a glimpse of the future of the "unified search." For listing sites proxi-servers may be their poison. It will soon becomes possible to bypass listing sites by the use of proxi-servers, software that emulates a server and permits material from anyone with internet access to have their material become visible in a single search.
It's logically a Google or Microsoft project, possibly even a project done on behalf of the ALA or a worldwide library group. It could rekindle the relationship between libraries and books by placing them at the epicenter of what the world of old and collectible books, and perhaps all books in time, will become. It would give booksellers back their primacy of place in book selling by restoring their visibility. It will not bring prices back to where they were, but for those items for which there is interest, it will create an efficient, low cost market that, by working for buyers, will work for sellers.
